Malaysia’s Creeping Fascism

A. Kugan is not the point. His race is not the point. His criminality is not the point. What is the point, is a bedrock fundamental of democratic process, the total and inviolable SEPARATION of enforcement, judgment, and punishment.

When police become judges and executionists, you have de facto fascism. It does not matter whom you elect into leadership. If that leadership cannot absolutely guarantee that those whom you turn to for protection will not attack and harm or kill you instead, the said leadership must either resign or be voted out of office. No other issues even matter, if alleged criminals start dying in prison.

The “fascism” crept further in when a former Malaysian police official beat someone up (it doesn’t matter who), until that person had to go all the way to Germany to obtain surgical relief from his severe back pains.

This “creeping fascism” was further welcomed into Malaysian national life when the aforementioned police official was given a three-month “suspended sentence”, i.e., he did not even go to jail!

This is why no enforcement authority can ever be trusted to “self-regulate”. Someone must always monitor enforcement actions from outside. Always. What is Putrajaya’s hesitation to form a truly independent police commission?

If you say that this is “the Malay way”, then the Malays may be said to favor fascism over democracy, as many other Muslims in this world also do, by tolerating or at least failing to resist the neo-fascist dictators who rule in so much of the Muslim world.

Asking some friends which Muslim countries had a claim to true democratization, the answer was clear — Indonesia first, Iran second, and Malaysia maybe one fourth of the way toward being the third.

No others. Either elections do not provide any REAL CHOICE of leaders, or else they may not be trusted. Nobody wins ninety-plus percent of any election in any real democracy.

Or, sad to say, if fair and true elections do choose devout Muslim leaders, this world’s OTHER “democratic” powers exercise THEIR creeping fascism by coming in and destroying those elected governments, such as in Algeria and Gaza.

“Fascism” is not an ideology as such. “Fascism” is rather the name for any governmental system in which power increases as you rise to the top of the governing hierarchy, until the top man has most or all of the available power over anybody.

Such “creeping fascists” may then enter any citizen’s life and ruin it without any permission or moral authority to do so. Beating up un-sentenced criminals in jail is only one example of how this “power-from-the-top” really works.

All this uproar about changing political parties here in Malaysia is an early symptom of the same misunderstanding. People may always change political parties, if they feel morally compelled to do so. “Disloyalty” is some sort of misplaced accusation deriving from “off-with-your-head” monarchical systems.

Both “disloyalty” and “sedition” are absurdly distorted allegations against many acts of freedom that people may espouse. Why, for example, should the South Thai be forced to live under Bangkok Buddhism when they have absolutely NOTHING in common with those Bangkok Thai?

Who ever asked the South Thai, who are mostly Melayu Muslim, what THEY wanted? Longing to be free to practice their own culture and faith cannot possibly be labeled “seditious”, except by egomaniacs in the Thai government.

And so it goes. World Wars one and two were both fought at horrendous cost to the human community, to defeat fascists and their ilk in all parts of the world. And yet the battle goes on. Any fascist dictator who calls himself “Muslim” is no less fascist, no less criminal, for doing so.

Azril Mohd Amin is an advocate and solicitor and also vice-president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM). This is his personal opinion.